Messages - merrak

Latest happenings: I'm nearing the point where I can migrate over from Tiled to my own editor. It's coming along pretty well, even thought it feels like there's still a lot to do. Still, I think having an editor that fully integrates with the way Vallas handles maps is worth the effort. Plus, all the UI code can now be used across multiple projects.

Defining sectors using Tiled was handled in a very clunky way, using tiles. They are the colorful tiles seen in some of the screenshots from Tiled.

This approach made it hard to do anything fancy, like 3D sectors ("room over room"), define properties of the sectors themselves (things like the name of the sector, lighting properties, monster spawn rates, etc.). All I could do with Tiled was define what coordinates belong to what sector.

New editor lets me "paint" sectors in 3D and also define properties. So far I have name and display name set up, but I'll add some menu options for other features.

I also started adding shortcuts. I'd like the editor to be entirely keyboard controlled. The cursor is moved with arrow keys + pgup/pgdn, and 'enter' to draw. You can select multiple tiles by holding down shift, so it's possible to paint entire walls at once.

It's a bit late, but I also made a 'Hello, World!' room. Here the draw order appears to be working, but I'm still finding little bugs with it. Draw order is handled differently than in the real game. The in-game renderer uses walls, where as the editor uses tiles. This means I can't see lighting effects in real time. I have to "compile" the map in order to see those.

You can communicate with a server using the GET/POST blocks in Game->Web. I've used them to communicate with a database. Not sure how well they'd work for a multiplayer game--a lot depends on the specifics of what you have in mind.

One approach to making an isometric game with Stencyl is to double up on the number of actors. Let's take the player for example. The player is represented by two actors: a "physics" actor and an "image" actor. The physics actor is invisible and moves around in the scene. The image actor is drawn at a position determined by where the physics actor is.

The primary function of this extension is to do the math needed to convert between the two coordinate systems. You're still on your own to set up rendering, computing the drawing order, etc. The example project should illustrate one way to do that, though. There are other ways, too. I wrote about a couple other approaches I experimented with in the journals forum.

It needs a bit more work. This was thrown together pretty quickly so that I'd have something usable in time. One thing I need to figure out is how to clarify dependencies.

Once the presentation is over I'll start migrating more resources over to it and tidy the site up. I've built up a significant library of behaviors--most of which were created for Ludum Dare contests. No sense in letting them go to waste if someone else would find them useful

I used Jekyll to build the site. I'm impressed with it so far. I didn't do anything fancy--using the default theme and no other customizations. But it was much easier to set up than Wordpress.

Recently I was asked to put together a short class at my town's library on creating a video game for the local teens. While I was making resources for it, I thought they would be worth sharing outside the presentation--so I started a resources website: http://www.anorthogonaluniverse.com/gamedev/

While the standard kit behaviors tend to be highly customizable, these behaviors are kept as simple as possible. I don't see why they couldn't be used in a full game, but they're really meant to be learning tools or 'starting points' for more complicated scripts.

I'm not done with the site yet. While I tried to minimize dependencies, some were unavoidable. Unfortunately, as of now the dependencies aren't noted. I did include a sample game that shows how the behaviors work together.

Can you grab the log files from the crash? My first thought is that you ran out of memory. Do you have a lot of large graphics files and sound files loading in the next scene? You can read memory use stats of your resources by going to settings -> atlases. Also, how much RAM does your Android device have?

"Last Collided" is likely returning null because nothing has collided with the actor in the first few frames. The way drawing events work is that all code in them is executed roughly 60 times per second--every time the screen needs to be painted.

I think the block was designed to be used with the collision events. Those wouldn't trigger unless something collided with the actor. There is a block in the attributes -> functions palette that will let you check if an actor has a value (Stencyl's wording for "null").

In your last screenshot, I'd use the '1st actor' and '2nd actor' blocks to refer to 'ans' and 'testes'.

If it's still not working, can you upload what you have so far to the Stencyl Arcade? It'd be easier to see what is going wrong that way.

Sorry for the trouble, I'm a developer myself, but have only touched stencyl for a couple of days. I wanted to do it with Godot or anywhere I could hardcode, but my kids' teacher wants them to use scratch or stencyl, I feel so old right now. I thought it was easy, but definitely this is not my forte.

You can use 'code mode' to write Haxe code... you can even use your own editor. I use this approach with 'mooedit' for pretty much anything other than simple scripts these days. That might be more familiar for you if you're used to text. However, if this is for your kids' assignment then they're probably expected to use blocks.

A lot of the default behaviors have complex code, because they were designed to be highly configurable.